Paris during the pandemic

A friend sent me, via good old-fashioned snail mail, a clipping from the print edition of the NY Times recently. I was feeling kind of lonely and ground down that day, so it really cheered me up to get something in the mail like that, from someone I hadn’t heard from in a while. The friend in question is my old high school French teacher, so it was a clipping about how Paris is doing right now. The answer is, unfortunately, not that great. Here’s the article. And a quote:

Paris is gone for now, its lifeblood cut off by the closure of all restaurants, its nights silenced by a 6 p.m. curfew aimed at eliminating the national pastime of the aperitif, its cafe bonhomie lost to domestic morosity. Blight has taken the City of Light.

I’d bookmarked a couple of other Paris-related articles over the last year, as the pandemic has progressed, including one from May: Atget’s Paris, 100 Years Later. It compares the photos of Eugène Atget, from the early 1900s, to current ones taken by a Times photographer, both showing empty streets in Paris.

And one from April, back at the beginning of the pandemic: Denuded of Tourists, Paris Reveals Its Old Beating Heart. It’s kind of sad how there doesn’t seem to have been much progress made between last April and now. Paris has a 6 PM curfew, and the Louvre is closed.

I’d been thinking about a trip to Europe on and off over the last decade or so, but never actually got around to making any real plans or committing to anything. Now I’m regretting that. I don’t think I’ll be comfortable with the idea of international travel any time soon, probably not for at least another year or two. So maybe 2023? Heck, I’m not even comfortable with the idea of a train ride to NYC yet.

Anyway, I guess I need to cherish whatever human connection I can get right now. I think I’ll print out this article about the Louvre and send it off to my friend, via good old snail mail. Or maybe this one from the Post about Edward Hopper’s early Paris paintings.

meditation apps

A couple of weeks back, I mentioned that I might want to write a blog post comparing Insight Timer and Calm. I was primarily using Insight Timer (the free version) for meditation last year, but I switched to Calm this year, since I got a free one-year premium subscription, via an AmEx promotion.

In general, I’ve been sticking with my meditation practice this year, though I’ve only been doing ten minutes a day, five days a week. That’s pretty similar to what I was doing last year, though I wasn’t always that consistent. I’d skip days if I got too busy at work, or if I just wasn’t in the mood.

With Insight Timer, I was mostly just using the timer function. I did occasionally try a guided meditation. Insight Timer has a ton of guided meditations available (over 50,000), most of which are available even for non-paying users. And I tried a few of their live events too (which are also available to everyone). I found a few instructors I liked, including Hugh Byrne and Joseph Goldstein. Overall, I didn’t really have any reason to switch away from Insight Timer. I was just curious about Calm.

With Calm, I’ve generally been doing the “Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt” meditations. Levitt is their “Head of Mindfulness” and the Daily Calm is a daily ten-minute guided meditation. I’m not sure if they’re actively creating new ones every day, or if they have a set of them that they cycle through. Either way, I haven’t heard the same one twice since I started. They’re pretty straightforward and not too “woo-woo” (if you know what I mean). They generally just concentrate on breathing and reinforcing the basics of meditation and mindfulness.

They also have a new series called The Daily Trip with Jeff Warren that started up about a month ago. I listened to one of those, out of curiosity, but I’ve been sticking with the Levitt ones. At some point, if I get a little more ambitious, I might try doing the Levitt ones during the day and the Warren ones in the evening, and see how that works out.

Calm also has a library of miscellaneous guided meditations, though I don’t think they have nearly as many as Insight Timer. I think that their selection is more “curated”, whereas Insight Timer lets just about anybody sign up as an instructor and start posting meditations.

When I started using Calm, I was kind of surprised to find that they didn’t have a simple timer, like Insight Timer does. I did eventually find one, though it’s buried in their app (under the “less guidance” category) and isn’t as functional as the Insight Timer one.

Both Calm and Insight Timer have been doing celebrity meditations, which I’m not terribly interested in. Calm has LeBron James. Insight Timer has Gisele Bündchen. Personally, I’d rather have a trained meditation teacher rather than a basketball player or a supermodel, but that’s just me.

Both platforms also have music. I don’t really see much value in this, and I can get plenty of ambient music elsewhere, but it’s kind of interesting to see what they’re doing. Insight Timer has a fairly odd selection of stuff from artists you probably haven’t heard of. Some of it is pretty good though. Calm has some pretty well-known artists in their music library, including Moby, deadmau5, and Sigur Rós. Though, again, I don’t know why you’d want to listen to this stuff in your meditation app rather than your music app.

And both apps also have gotten into the sleep stories trend (and other sleep-related audio). Calm has stories narrated by Stephen Fry, Matthew McConaughey, and Keith Urban. Insight Timer has an eclectic collection of sleep stories, talks, and music, but no big celebrity sleep content, as far as I can tell. (The sleep tracking app I use, Sleep Cycle, also has some sleep stories, though I haven’t tried them.) There’s an interesting article in the NY Times, from 2019, about Calm and their sleep-related content here. I haven’t really tried out the sleep stuff at all. Maybe I should give it a shot, one of these days.

In general, I’d say that, if you’re new to meditation, and don’t mind paying for Calm (or can get it for free like I did), it’s not a bad deal. I don’t place much value on the celebrity content, but the regular daily meditation content is pretty good. Since I’d already been meditating for a few years (on and off) when I started with Calm, I didn’t bother checking out their beginner content, but it’s probably pretty good. If you’d rather go with a free app, Insight Timer has some good content for beginners, including their Learn How To Meditate In Seven Days course, which is free. They also have a free 40-day course called Mindfulness Daily At Work, which I did last year, and it’s really good. (Their other courses generally require a premium subscription.)

If you’re an experienced meditator, and you just need a timer, then the free version of Insight Timer should be fine for you. If you’re looking for a wide range of guided meditations, then, again, Insight Timer is great (though you may need to wade through some mediocre ones to find the good ones). If you’re experienced, but looking for some professional, high-quality, guided meditations, and you don’t mind paying for a subscription, then Calm is a good choice. Likewise, if you’re experienced and don’t mind paying for a subscription, but you’re looking for a good selection of courses, then the premium version of Insight Timer might be best for you. (Hope that’s not too confusing.)

For myself, I’m going to stick with Calm this year, for the most part. I may go back to Insight Timer occasionally if I just want to do a simple timed meditation, or if I want to try out one of their live events. And I keep trying to talk myself into meditating seven days a week instead of just on weekdays. But I keep getting distracted with other stuff on the weekend.

Online Learning Resources

I have a bunch of topics I’ve been meaning to blog about this year, and just haven’t had the time to get to too many of them. A lot of my blogging recently has been more “getting stuff off my chest” blogging or “clearing out my head” blogging. But I have a few topics to cover that might be mildly useful to other people. Today’s topic is going to be an overview of online learning resources. I had to write up some notes of this stuff for work recently, since we’re doing a review of the training resources we make available in the IT department. So this post is basically repurposed from an email I sent to my boss.

I get a fair amount of use out of Pluralsight. I have my own subscription, but we also have a department subscription at work. Pluralsight is really good for .NET stuff and other Microsoft-specific programming topics. It does cover topics outside of the Microsoft ecosystem, but not as well. It’s all video training (no books).

We also have a Percipio account at work, and I’ve poked around in it a bit, but haven’t gotten much out of it. There are a lot of books and videos available, and it covers a much wider set of subjects than Pluralsight. There’s probably a lot of useful stuff in there, but it’s not that useful for me. (Percipio seems to be a rebranding of Skillsoft, which I also have access to via my ACM membership.)

I’ve also tried out LinkedIn Learning, which we have access to at work. This platform has a much wider breadth of material than Pluralsight or Percipio, and includes a lot of non-IT oriented stuff. I’m looking at the home page now, and I’m seeing stuff like “Life Mastery: Achieving Happiness and Success”. Basically, a lot of “soft skill” stuff. There’s plenty of content for programmers too though. Like Pluralsight, it’s all video (no books). From what I’ve watched, I’d say that the quality of stuff on this platform is pretty mixed. Some of it is really good, and some of it is more on the level of what you’d get from random YouTube videos. (And LinkedIn Learning is a rebranding of Lynda, which I still (I think) have access to via the Somerset County Library.)

Through my membership in ACM, I have access to the O’Reilly learning platform (formerly Safari), which is, I think, the best one out there for programming topics. They have basically every programming-related book that gets published by any of the major publishers (and some minor ones). It used to be just an ebook platform, but they’ve adding a lot of video content too. And the ACM access used to be to just a subset of the full Safari library, but it’s now the full library, which is awesome. (See previous mention here.)

Outside of paid learning platforms, there’s a lot of free stuff out there now. Microsoft has a lot of stuff at Microsoft Learn and Channel 9. And all of their conferences went virtual (and free) in 2020. Both Build and Ignite had some good content last year. Ignite is already scheduled for March 2-4 this year, and will be free and virtual.

In terms of my own current online learning, I’m trying to finish a course on ASP.NET Core Fundamentals on Pluralsight. I’ve been really busy at work though, and haven’t watched any of it in more than a week. (And yes, I know, I could watch it at night or on the weekend, but I’ve been either tired and/or busy on weeknights and weekends lately too. But that’s a subject for an entirely different blog post.)

too much snow

Fair warning: this is going to be a rambling post, mostly complaining about the weather, and about how crappy I’ve been feeling. You’ve been warned.

We started off February here in NJ with a huge snowstorm on Monday. According to NJ.com, we got 23 inches here in Somerville. I’m pretty sure it’s the worst snowstorm we’ve had since the big one in January 2016. I’m very glad that I can work from home right now. That wasn’t the case in 2016, and dealing with driving and parking turned out to be quite a big problem. This time, I just left my car alone on Monday and Tuesday, and stayed indoors. (I did knock a little snow off it on Tuesday, but not much.) On Wednesday, I made a concerted effort to dig it out of the snow. Over the course of three 30-minute sessions, I managed to get about halfway there. But then, Wednesday night, I felt horrible. Lots of pain, sore throat, headache. I guess I’m just too old and broken to do manual labor anymore. I left it alone again on Thursday, and tried to heal up. I felt a little better today, but still not great. I did a little more digging, but maybe just 15 minutes, total. At this point, between the digging and some melting, I could probably move the car if I had to. But I’m still feeling pretty bad.

What’s left of the snow (and there’s a lot) isn’t likely to melt anytime soon. And now we’ve got another storm coming in this weekend, bringing maybe another eight inches. I’m really glad that I don’t need the car right now. I’ve been ordering my groceries from Whole Foods for the last few months, and getting them delivered. And I have ShopRite in walking distance too. And it looks like my company won’t be asking us to get back into the office for quite some time. So I may just leave the car where it is for the rest of the month. I should probably try to drive it around a little at some point this month, if I can, but I don’t think it’ll be a huge problem if I let it sit for the next few weeks, if I have to.

Now it’s Friday night, and I still have some pain in various parts of my body, plus a bit of a headache, and still kind of a sore throat. I plan on getting up early tomorrow and doing my laundry. After that, I think I’ll just be resting up for the remainder of the weekend. The Super Bowl is Sunday, but I have to admit that I don’t much care about it. I didn’t pay any attention to football this year.

I have a bunch of other stuff I want to blog about, some of which might actually be useful or entertaining. But I sure don’t have the energy for it right now. Maybe if I feel better on Saturday afternoon or Sunday, I’ll try to write something useful. For now, this is all I got.

fun with audiobooks

I have a long history of complaining about audiobook-related issues on this blog. The most recent entry in the saga is here, from November of last year. I’ve been playing around with some audiobook stuff again recently, so I thought I’d write another post.

First, let me say that my issue with the Audible iOS app seems to have resolved itself. The issue started back in June, and was still an issue in November. The app would always crash after about 30 seconds or so. I tried every combination of deleting, reinstalling, rebooting, etc., that I could think of. I guess Audible eventually fixed the issue, or it went away on its own, or something. Either way, I’m pretty sure I could listen to an Audible book now, if I wanted to.

I’ve also been messing around with my library of audiobooks in Apple’s Books app. I mentioned the annoying limitations of the macOS Books app in that November post. Those all still exist. But I spent some time recently cleaning out some old audiobooks that didn’t need to be in the library, and moving some into folders in OneDrive for safekeeping. So now I feel a little better about that.

While looking through the handful of audiobooks that I’d bought from Apple over the years, I discovered that at least one of them was no longer downloadable from them. I still have a copy of it, and it still plays, but if I delete it, I think it’ll be gone forever. So I backed that one up. (Not that I’m ever going to listen to it again. It was a nice mystery novel, but nothing special.) Several of the oldest audiobooks that I have from Apple don’t seem to be available anymore, at least in the same version that I originally bought. They do still show in my purchase history, and seem to be re-downloadable though. These go back to the early days of Apple’s audiobook store, when they were really only reselling stuff from Audible. (I guess that, technically, they’re still reselling a lot of stuff that’s provided by Audible, but they’re not just doing that.)

And I’ve still got a lot of DRM-free audiobooks and audiodramas in my “waiting to read” pile. The next time I want to read one, I might try out Bound, or something similar. Or I might try to create a consolidated audiobook file with something like Join Together or Audiobook Builder, so maybe I can get a cleaner listening experience in Apple’s Books app.

Right now, I’m listening to an abridged version of A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. I’m pretty sure I’ve listened to it already, but it would have been back before I started assiduously logging everything I read (or listen to). Anyway, I’ve forgotten it all, so it’s good to get a refresher. And listening to Bill Bryson calmly talk about science is a nice way to wind down at the end of the day.

Speaking of which, I’ve gotten back into the habit of listening to a bit of an audiobook near the end of the day, on most days. If I’ve got the right book, I think it helps me wind down a bit. Prior to the Bryson book, I was finishing up a BBC adaptation of War and Peace. That was also pretty good for winding down. I’ve got at least one Harry Potter book in audio form. And I’ve got The Hobbit, and some version of Lord of the Rings around here somewhere. And a few Neil Gaiman books. So I should be OK for end-of-the-day listening for the foreseeable future.

managing long-term reminders, take three

Back in November, I had a problem at work, where all of my long-term reminders in Outlook were unexpectedly deleted. The details on that can be found here, with some follow-up here. I’d managed to move all of the tasks to Planner, but I wasn’t really happy with it. At the beginning of this year, I revisited things and decided to delete them from Planner and re-create them in To Do. I still wasn’t 100% happy, but To Do was close enough that it would be workable.

Well, today, I launched To Do and got a message saying “Your account is incompatible with To Do”. Apparently, Microsoft has decided to no longer support using To Do in an environment with on-premises Exchange. Some detail on that can be found here. So I had to print my To Do list to PDF, then re-enter it back into Planner. I’m not real happy about that, and I still don’t really like Planner.

I’d like to switch to Todoist, but that’s now officially on the forbidden list at my company, for some reason. Trello is allowed, but that’s not quite what I’m looking for. Remember The Milk isn’t on either the approved or forbidden lists, so maybe I could try that?

I generally resist combining personal and work stuff into a single account/system, but maybe for this I should consider it. I won’t be storing any proprietary or sensitive data in my reminders system, just basic notes like “renew this SSL cert by this date.” I use Evernote for all of my personal reminders, and that’s probably good enough for the work stuff too, though I’m not really comfortable with the idea. Oh well. I’ve spent too much time on this stuff today, so I should really just stop. Planner is good enough for now, even if I don’t really like it.

 

Another Sunday Morning

This post will probably be a lot like last week’s Sunday Morning post. (With a few differences, maybe.) Unlike last week, I did actually sleep kinda OK last night. A friend dropped by yesterday, and we split a pizza, so I was a little worried that might make it hard to sleep (on top of all the other things that make it hard to sleep right now). So I took Tums, ibuprofen, and melatonin before bed. And I took a shower before bed too, to try to ease some muscle pain and clear out my sinuses a bit. So all that added up to me being able to (kinda) sleep through the night. I didn’t get out of bed until 7:30 though. I’m not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. I seem to be making it through the day without too much trouble so far. It’s 11:30 now, and I’ve managed to go out for a 10-minute walk and a 15-minute ride on my exercise bike. Neither of which sounds really impressive, but it’s really cold out, so it wasn’t easy to talk myself into going outside at all. And, these days, I have trouble making it past 10 minutes on the exercise bike, so 15 minutes is pretty good for me.

I just read a year-old Washington Post article about how exercise reduces anxiety and makes you feel more connected. A lot of the benefit of exercise applies whether you’re exercising alone or in a group. But, apparently, there’s even more benefit to group exercise. The article was written before the pandemic really took hold, but it’s interesting to think about how the lack of group exercise might be affecting people, and whether things like Apple’s Fitness+ or Peloton actually come close enough to simulating a real in-person group experience to actually matter. Peloton (of course) thinks it does, according to this blog post. I wonder if mounting my iPhone to my old exercise bike and watching an Apple Fitness+ video while I’m biking would help or if it would just annoy me. I tend to think it would annoy me, but who knows. (Today, I was listening to an old podcast interview with Weird Al while I did my exercise. I’m not sure a Fitness+ video could really top Weird Al. Come to think of it, can we convince Weird Al to record some fitness videos? That would be awesome.)

I’ve also come across a few references recently to a new book titled Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding. I’m probably not going to read that book, but I’ve bookmarked a couple of videos and podcasts featuring the author, and I’ll probably get around to watching/listening to one or more of them at some point.

One more Peloton-related link: I wonder if Joe Biden’s security folks have figured out if can use his Peloton bike without compromising national security yet?

Well, I started this blog post with the idea of writing about my current meditation habit, and how I’ve switched from Insight Timer to Calm, but now it’s lunchtime, so maybe that’ll have to wait until the next post.

Monday links and pandemic thoughts

I often spend a few minutes spelunking through the links in my “On This Day” sidebar, if I happen to pull up my home page for some reason. I know that’s not really a productive use of my time, usually, but sometimes I find some fun stuff. Today’s links included a reference to a 2016 NY Times article titled How Social Isolation Is Killing Us. However isolated I was feeling back then, it’s nothing compared to how I’m feeling after ten months of working from home, not traveling outside of NJ, and spending nearly all of my time alone in my apartment.

I’d like to think things are looking up now, but looking at some more recent links:

  • Two Masks Are the New Masks – I think I’m still fine with just one mask, but if I ever actually have to take a train to NYC or something like that, maybe I’ll try doubling up. (And maybe I should look into those KF94 masks they mentioned in the article. I already have a few KN95s. Can’t hurt to have a few different options, I guess…)
  • How to Take a Walk – This is kind of silly, but I get it.
  • It’s 30 Degrees. Shall We Have Brunch Outdoors? – There really isn’t anyplace here in Somerville that’s still doing outdoor dining. I should have taken more advantage of that, back when the weather was nicer. Of course, back then, every place that was doing outdoor dining was too crowded.

I’m looking at the calendar now, and thinking that, at the end of this week, I’ll at least be able to say “I made it through January!” My hope is that things start getting better in February. I’m hoping that vaccine distribution will start ramping up, the weather will start getting nicer, the days will get longer, and Tom Brady will lose another Super Bowl. Then we can move on to March, which is when things will really start getting better. (I hope.)

Heavy Metal

I discovered the Heavy Metal movie soundtrack on Apple Music recently. I had it on vinyl back in the early 80s, when I was in high school. I never bought it on CD, or from iTunes, because, for a long time, it just wasn’t available.

I’m not sure when I first actually saw the movie. It came out in 1981, but I don’t think I saw it until I was in college, so it would have been late 80s. And, likewise, I never got around to buying the movie on DVD or Blu-ray, though I’m pretty sure I had it on VHS at one point.

Anyway, I really listened to that soundtrack album a lot. Hearing it again is triggering long-dormant neurons in my brain. Now I guess I should buy the Blu-ray and see how many neurons get lit up by that.

I’ve been meaning to try an Apple Music embed on this blog, and it might as well be this. So here you go: the Heavy Metal soundtrack! It’s pretty corny and dated, but it’s one of my favorite albums from my misspent youth.

Sunday morning

I’m not sure I should really be writing a blog post right now, but I might as well give it a shot. I didn’t sleep well last night, and I’m still a little groggy. But I want to post a few links and get some stuff out of my head, so here goes.

First topic: Biden’s inauguration. A lot has already been written about that, and I don’t really have much to add, but I’d like to note one item of interest: Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem. Here’s an article from the NY TImes and one from NPR, both of which include video. I think it’s worth watching her read the whole thing. I’m not really a fan of this particular style of poetry, but I really think this was the right poem (and poet) for this particular moment in time. Here’s an interview with Gorman, again from NPR, from the day before the inauguration. And here’s something from Literary Hub, with every inaugural poem, ever. (There aren’t that many.)

Next (and completely different) topic: robocalls. I’ve been getting a lot of them lately. I can’t do much about those that come in on my home phone line. I get so few calls on that number that nearly all the calls I do get are robocalls (or unsolicited calls from actual humans). I’ve thought about dropping the line entirely, but I don’t really want to lose that phone number. Porting it over to a VOIP provider that does robocall screening is possible, I guess, but I don’t really want to mess with that right now.

For my cell phone, I’ve started looking at iOS call screening apps. I already have Verizon’s Call Filter app enabled on my phone, but it doesn’t do much. And I sometimes turn on the iOS silence unknown callers feature, but I can’t leave that on all the time. Here’s a Washington Post article from 2019 that I used as a good starting point for third-party apps. I’m worried about the privacy implications of some of them. For now, I’ve installed and enabled Nomorobo. The Sweet Setup, in this 2017 article, named Nomorobo as the best app for blocking robocalls. The guy who wrote that article shares a lot of the same privacy concerns that I have, and Nomorobo is just about the only app that doesn’t have some privacy issues. I’m on a two-week trial subscription. So far, I don’t think it’s successfully blocked any robocalls, so it’s not looking good. Since robocallers can basically just randomize their phone numbers, I’m not sure any call blocking solution is going to be really effective.

I’ll probably give up on the whole idea and just stick with the “silence unknown callers” method. That does mean that I’ll have to continue toggling it on and off, whenever I’m expecting a call from someone that’s not in my contacts (like a mechanic or doctor’s office that might not be calling from their main number). Here’s a blog post from someone comparing the utility of SUC vs DND (do not disturb). My thoughts on it are pretty similar to his. I think SUC would be a lot more useful if Apple would put a toggle for it in control center.

Next topic (also completely different): Sátántangó. I mentioned about a month ago that I had pre-ordered the new Blu-ray release. It should have shown up this weekend, but apparently got lost somehow. So I guess I’m not going to spend the day watching a 7.5-hour, black & white, Hungarian film.

Last topic: Harold Budd. I was listening to a podcast this week and the host mentioned that Budd had passed away recently. I did a little searching and found obituaries from the Times and NPR. His death was apparently related to Covid-19, so that’s one more artist lost in 2020 to this pandemic. My favorite Harold Budd album is The Pearl, an album he recorded with Brian Eno in 1984. Today might actually be a good day to listen to some Harold Budd. Some nice slow ambient piano music might just help me get my brain back on track, after last night’s troubled sleep.